


Frosted

by shipperofinsanity



Category: Frozen (2013), Tangled (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 21:04:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1361725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipperofinsanity/pseuds/shipperofinsanity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something that's not quite ice and not quite dew; something that covers what it touches, wraps around it, encloses it entirely, makes it look cold to anything and anyone that observes it; something that, in actuality, traps the heat inside, to keep alive whatever it's found. It acts as a living barrier, a camouflage of sorts - look dead, be detached, stay alive as comfortably as you possibly can, private, alone, but healthy, growing. Something not solid, nor liquid; something that can be brushed off but can't be gotten rid of with force. It's either love, or it's frost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frosted

**Author's Note:**

> (Whenever Elsa is at Anna's door, you can read her dialogue to the tune of "Do You Wanna Build a Snowman".)

     "We're engaged!"

     With the way Anna was smiling, you'd think she couldn't remember what happened the last time she told Elsa that. Elsa's blood had always run cold; it was in her biology, in her creation. And Anna's blood had run cold before - she doubted Anna could forget that. But, for not the first time, Elsa's veins went hot with the friction of her blood through them, pumped by the heart that had started beating too quickly. She wasn't angry, but - but she was warm, too hot. Uncomfortably hot. She pulled her collar away from her throat and swallowed.

     Anna looked at her, blinking, waiting, Kristoff standing right beside her and watching her with narrowed, if kind, eyes. "Elsa?"

    "Good for you!"

     A lesson in congratulations: "Good for you" will always sound sarcastic, even if you're sincere.

     Anna blinked again, this time her grin sliding. "I'm sorry?"

     "No, I meant it," Elsa rushed to reassure her, stumbling over her tongue and speaking slowly. "I'm really glad you're getting married." She looked at Kristoff, who had widened his eyes back to their original size and was studying her face intently. She nodded, pulling her shoulders back, and smiled at him. "And I'm sure you'll be very good to her."

    Anna had begun beaming again. But - this had... she was still a baby. _No, she isn't_. She's too young. She's only known him for two years. _It's more than long enough. She loves him_. She's not an adult yet, not grown up enough... Anna was blabbering again, her mouth moving a million miles an hour and Kristoff's eyes averted to her, listening, nodding and laughing as she went on, getting in a word or two. Every now and again she'd raise her hands above her head and Elsa's eyes would catch on the band around her finger. He loved her, she loved him. She'd known that for years now. So, why..?

     It might have something to do with how she had largely missed Anna growing up. If Anna had ever really grown up, that is. Just yesterday Elsa had caught her when she had fallen off the banister trying to slide down the stairs. She still woke Elsa up in the middle of the night sometimes to play with Olaf or "Can we pleeeeeeaaaaaase take Sven for a ride? He so wants to!" She was still a kid, still innocent and naive and gentle. But she wasn't.

    "If you'll excuse me," Elsa murmured, knowingly interrupting Anna's excited chatter and walking around her towards the door.

     A hand grabbed hers, and, like always, she felt the flash of an old urge to pull away before she could cover her sister in ice - but didn't, and instead turned back at the touch, looking at her, waiting for an explanation as to why she'd be grabbed.

     "What's wrong?" Anna's brow was furrowed. "I thought you were happy for us?"

     "I am."

     "Then why do you look so..." Anna struggled for a word for a moment. "...weird?"

     Elsa raised her eyebrow and allowed herself a smile at Anna's botched vocabulary. "Weird?"

     "No, not weird, just not normal!" Anna rolled her eyes at herself at she spoke, bending down, using her whole frame to speak, as she always did. "You know, weird, strange, unusual -"

     "That's nice, Anna," she teased lightly.

     "Oh, you know what I mean," Anna sighed, exasperated. "So what's wrong?"

     Elsa grimaced and smiled at the same time, the corners of her mouth simultaneously up and down. "It's all me, Anna," she said, in lieu of explanation.

     "What is?" Kristoff chimed in.

     Elsa looked at him, measuring him, up and down. For two years he'd been in the palace almost every day, teasing Anna, kissing Anna, making jokes and cooking and sledding and caring for their garden - Sven was housed in the stables during winter and Olaf had his own bedroom. The staff knew him as well as they knew Elsa, which frightened her a bit, but it was, over all, a good thing. Anna was easy to pick fights with (a feisty little thing like her could never keep her tongue) and, unfortunately, Kristoff was often around to be fought with - but they were small spats and he was a good boy, and she knew that. But... _Anna_.

     "I..." _How do I say this properly?_ "...am less than thrilled with this."

     "Wait, what?" Anna retracted her hand, standing up straight and backing up into Kristoff's hold again. It was a choreographed move, something they'd done a million times. "Like a crazy trust exercise," Anna had remarked once while Elsa was in hearing, and she and Kristoff had laughed. "Why not?" she asked now.

     Elsa's half-smile drifted downward. "I feel like more time would be nice," she admitted. "But you have my blessing."

     "More time?" Kristoff asked, eyebrows rising.

     "It's been two years," Anna told her, as if she didn't know.

     "I'm aware."

     "I'll never -"

     "I know, Kristoff," she said, her hands clasped in front of her loosening a bit as she tried to quell the feelings that were swirling around. Her heart was beating dangerously slow now; the tempo had shifted, changed, descended into the zone where Elsa could feel the bits of ice everywhere in her. "You're my friend, too."

     "So what's the problem?" Anna demanded. Ever the feisty one.

     Elsa paused again. "I think you're a bit young." She shook her head. "No, that's not it. I think - never mind."

     "No, what?"

     She took a deep breath. "Not too young," she amended. "Just... a bit immature."

     "Elsa -"

     "I am not!" Anna cut off Kristoff's quiet warning to her older sister, her nostrils widening and her chin jutting out.

     "I don't mean -"

     "No, that's not fair!" Anna crossed her arms over her chest.

     "Anna -" Kristoff tried.

     "I know it's -"

     "No, you don't know!" Anna shook her head, and, true to form, brought her hands away from her, gesturing wildly as she spoke. "You shut yourself behind a door for twelve years!"

     "And during those twelve years, did you actually mature any?" Elsa sighed.

     Nobody really expected Anna's outburst.

     "You locked the door on me!" She screeched, and Kristoff pulled away abruptly, the noise level piercing, his hands on his ears. "How can you call me a kid when you locked the door on me? I grew up, Elsa! You just refused to watch me!"

     "Anna -" Elsa tried placating, her hands extended, her fingers curled in.

     "I sat outside your door for a decade!" she screamed.

      "Anna -" she tried again, louder.

     "I did everything I could to make myself happy away from you, and I'm not sorry for not being as responsible or calm as you want me to be, but I am responsible, and I have been calm! I -"

     "Anna!"

     "I followed you to the top of a mountain that should have killed me! You _tried_ to kill me, you set a huge monster on us, and _now_ you're being overprotective?!"

     "That was to pr-"

     "Don't you DARE SAY YOU WERE TRYING TO PROTECT ME!" Anna's voice had become shriller and more thunderous than any crack of lightning Elsa had ever heard. Her heart was slow, too slow... Oh, no, no no no no _no_ \- "FORCING ME TO STAY AWAY ISN'T PROTECTING ME!"

     "Anna, stop!"

     She didn't hear. "YOU KNOW WHAT'S PROTECTING ME? LETTING ME IN!"

     "ANNA, STOP IT!" Her fingers were beginning to sting at the tips, the same way Anna’s eyes had started to; in tiny pieces that slowly grew into a whole. She tucked her hands underneath her arms and caved inward – she might not have much body heat, but she had enough to slow the ice.

     "Anna -" Kristoff grabbed her, tried to spin her around, but she stepped away and yanked him off of her, her face redder than her hair.

     " _I BURIED OUR PARENTS ALONE, ELSA_!

     “NO!”

     “ANNA!”

     Kristoff leapt forward and grabbed Anna, turning them around so he covered her from the jagged explosion of clear, smooth, blinding light that shot all around – and Elsa flew back with the force of having tried to contain it. It flew through the spot where Kristoff had been just moments after he and Anna tumbled to the floor, and, once the ice had painted its slippery stripe around the walls of the room and the dusting of snow had settled on the ground around imprints of Elsa’s feet, there was silence – the kind you find in winter when you’re alone outside and the trees are covered.

     There were footsteps from outside the room, quick, hurried footsteps, and the door flung open. “Anna!” Olaf yelped from behind the guard, and his pads of feet ran easily across the winterized floor to the princess and her soon-to-be prince on the ground.

     “Queen Elsa,” the guard huffed, running to her, stretching out a gloved hand to help her up.

     “No! No, no, please!”

     The guard paused immediately, pulling back his hand and standing upright formally, his eyes still watching her as she tucked the hair back from her face and folded her hands together to keep them from shaking.

     “El-“

     “Shh, Anna.” Kristoff’s anxious whisper curdled Elsa’s insides.

     “Elsa!” Olaf cried out cheerfully, against Kristoff’s hush. “It’s okay! Nobody’s hurt! Yaaay!”

     Anna clamped a hand over his mouth and clutched Kristoff’s hand too tightly. Her knuckles matched the color of Elsa’s skin. “Come on,” she said, and then she was pulling Olaf along behind her as she and Kristoff tried to leave the room quietly. It was what they always did, what they were supposed to do. It wasn’t as if this was the first meltdown Elsa had had since coming home – but it was the first directed at and caused by Anna, and she didn’t look up to see the tears she could hear in her sister’s voice.

     Members of the staff crowded the door and piled in, and, when they saw the ball of Elsa at the statuesque guard’s feet, they, too, froze. She took a breath deep enough to still the twisted stomach she boasted a bit, and then stood up on her own, her shoulders back and hands locked formally behind her, her posture stiff.

-~*~-

     “Anna?” She knocked on her sister’s closed door. “Come on, I know you’re in there.”

     There was no response.

     “I’m sorry that I yelled,” she said, quieter now, on the off chance anybody was within hearing distance but her sister.

     Again, silence.

     “I don’t want to fight anymore,” she admitted. She rattled the knob once. “I hate these stupid doors.” She sighed. “I want to make this well.”

     The same silence that had been in the room was behind that door. She shuddered.

     “Anna, please, I’m reaching out now,” she begged, her clasped hands resting on the door with her forehead. “I don’t know what to do. I just want to talk to you.”

     So she walked back into her own room and left the door wide open in case Anna changed her mind – though she hadn’t yet in over a week.

-~*~-

     In the time during which Anna avoided her sister, Elsa talked to Kristoff plenty. It was settled pretty early between them that what had happened was an accident and everyone was at fault, not just Elsa – but not even Kristoff could convince Anna to purposefully seek Elsa out, or even let Elsa seek her out, and the staff tiptoed around her, afraid to set her off again.

     It was always like that after something like this, and she always hated it. But Kristoff was a wonderful person to talk to.

     “It really is amazing,” he said, looking up at the castle from the grounds where they walked, her as she normally did and him bundled against the late November cold.

     “The castle?” she asked.

     “The ice,” he said, looking back at her. “Which isn’t to say that the castle isn’t amazing by itself, but the ice adds something.”

     She chuckled softly. “Thank you.”

     “You’re welcome.” He smiled. “Has Anna -?”

     Elsa smiled back sadly. “No.”

     “Ah.” He nodded, understanding. “She’ll come around.”

     Elsa didn’t return the reassurance. She wasn’t positive. The longest she and her sister had gone without speaking since the whole fiasco two years ago was a measly three hours. Being without her for over a week was horrifying, and Elsa wondered just how frightened Anna was, past the anger. The idea of it made her head throb, and she shoved it from her mind again, striding slowly but purposefully down the cobblestone. The open gates glinted in the afternoon sun and the snow on top of them caught and sparkled.

     “She will,” Kristoff pressed on. “I know it. I just – ugh.”

     “You just _ugh_?”

     “It’s kind of horrible, knowing your sister disapproves of something you want to do more than anything and then causing her to… well, blow up in a bunch of ice.”

     Elsa stopped walking. “She didn’t –“

     “Especially when it’s happened before,” Kristoff finished.

     Elsa sighed silently, her shoulders dropping. “Yeah, I know.”

     “It was kind of you to give us your blessing, when you disapproved,” Kristoff tried to compliment her, his mouth in a half-awkward grin.

     “I don’t disapprove of the marriage,” Elsa refuted.

     Kristoff raised an eyebrow.

     “I don’t,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I disapprove of her inability to think of anything _but_ marriage. She’s still just a kid.”

     “So are you,” he pointed out.

     “I haven’t been a kid since I was eight,” Elsa told him. “And I’m an adult, by the kingdom’s policy. Old enough to rule.”

   “And rule well,” Kristoff said, his grin no longer awkward. “But Anna could, too. She’s an adult by the kingdom’s policy, just like you are.”

     “Barely,” Elsa argued pointlessly. “She only just came of age last month.”

     “Which means technically, I did you a favor by waiting a month to propose.” His smug little smirk broke through the sobriety she was speaking with and she laughed a small and quiet laugh.

     “You did,” she agreed. “Thank you for that.” And then she pulled her shoulders back again, and, when she noticed him watching her do it, asked, “What?”

     “Nothing,” he said, looking back up at her eyes again. “It’s just that you always do that when you’re Queen Elsa.”

     “I’m always Queen Elsa,” she said.

     “Nah,” he shook his head. “Queen Elsa pulls her shoulders back and is polite.”

     Elsa chuckled, “Does that mean normal Elsa is rude?”

     Kristoff joined her in the muted chortles and then corrected her: “No, but there’s a difference between polite and kind, and normal Elsa is kind.”

     “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”

     “You’re welcome.”

-~*~-

     Anna stood as far as she possibly could without completely disregarding the traditional pacing when summoned to the throne room – ergo, she bowed, barely, curtly, at the edge of the carpet that stretched from Elsa’s throne. “You called for me,” she said stiffly.

     Elsa’s hopes for this died a bit. It was Olaf’s idea to do this – to bring her privately into a room, where it would be harder to bring others into a problematic situation and where they could talk without being overheard. But now it just seemed like Anna was talking to a stranger, or an employer whom she only worked for out of debt. Everything she did was lined with hostility. “I did,” she confirmed. And, when Anna didn’t reply, she said, “I’m sorry, Anna. You know you have my full support in this.”

     Anna seemed to literally bite her tongue for a moment before she replied. “Thank you, your highness.”

     Elsa’s knuckles turned even whiter against the cold of her throne. “Anna,” she pleaded.

     Anna merely raised her eyebrows.

     Elsa sighed. “Okay, fine.” She shook her head infinitesimally. “But I want an answer to something and if I have to order it out of you, I will.”

     For a brief moment, Anna looked shocked that Elsa was returning the political formality, but then she regained her composure and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

     “Good,” she said, and sat back in her chair, purposefully straightening up and squaring her shoulders. Anna’s hands twitched, trying to grab her skirt, to keep themselves from shaking. “Have you really not forgiven me for the time I spent away from you?”

     Anna squared her own shoulders. “I haven’t.”

     Elsa didn’t know what else to do. The majority of her existence had been spent behind a door, latched and locked, the keyhole stuffed, the crack underneath filled in when she was twelve because she’d accidentally frozen the hallway outside in an accident. Her life had been imprisoned in her bedroom, and all because of a strip of hair on Anna’s head that was gone now, a bit of ice that had dissipated. Love will thaw, but not even love can melt the frigidity of bitterness. And everything, all she’d done, had been for Anna. It wasn’t her choice to take away her sister’s memories, or to shut herself behind a door; not at first. By the time it was, it was only because without her parents around to calm her down, there was no one left around whom she and they could be safe – she was a chemical concoction prepared by an under-taught amateur, frozen but still growing; reserved but dangerously volatile. How was she supposed to make up for that? She thought she had. “Why?” she asked, and she was both pleased and wounded at how flat her voice was.

     Anna shook her head. “I – Elsa, you left me alone. I know you didn’t want to, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t convinced for the longest time that you hated me, or that I did something wrong.” She had begun talking with her hands again subconsciously, just fiddling with her fingers, looking at them and not Elsa. “I thought for more than half my life that I had somehow hurt you, and then it turned out that you’re the one that hurt me, you lied, and kept secrets, and you still expect me to think that you did all those things out of love?”

     “What else could I have done?” she asked.

     Anna shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything else. You could have opened the door just once, you could have apologized, said it was your fault. I just don’t know. You could have given me a little bit of closure, at least. When you love someone, you give them closure.”

     “What other reason could I have had?”

     Anna clasped her hands together firmly. “You could just be cold-hearted,” she pointed out.

     “Cold isn’t evil, Anna.”

     “No, but cold is painful.” She brought her chin up, almost haughtily. “I would know.”

     “So would I.”

     The unspoken challenge hung in the air, and suddenly the chill of her seat was too much, too sharp, too… whatever it was, it hurt.

     “You’re dismissed,” Elsa said, and she felt like the characters in her books on the days when getting out of bed felt like climbing a mountain; dull, empty, and monotonous.

-~*~-

     “Elsa!” Not for the first time, the tiny – and somehow older – brunette clambered off the ship klutzily, wobbling a bit as she traipsed toward her cousin, having not yet gotten her land legs back. Her bright green eyes, so much like Anna’s, were wide with excitement, her grin stretched across her cheeks. Her luggage was moving behind her, manned by, no doubt, her husband, who was grumbling about “always carrying the load, jeez, could you –“ under his breath.

     “Rapunzel,” Elsa said, and held out her arms.


End file.
